Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Though it may seem counter intuitive from the layperson’s
perspective, but can sound be used as a brain analysis tool?

By: Ringo Bones

It is now a well-accepted physiological fact that one of the
serious side effects of brain disorders is impaired hearing. That fact was put
to work by Arnold Starr and two other researchers from the University of
California at Irvine, who developed a way to make use of psycho-acoustical
hearing impediment to locate disorders in the brain. Would such a method prove
to be a very useful new diagnostic tool - as in using sound as a brain analysis tool - to assess how healthy one’s brain is?

The procedure is begun by placing electrodes on the
patient’s scalp and earlobes. A series of loud clicks is then sent in rapid
succession through earphones worn by the patient. As the nerve impulse
generated in the inner ear by each click travels through the brain circuitry,
it is detected by a super sensitive tracking system, isolated from each other
activity in the brain by a computer and recorded. The result is a graph whose
peaks represent the activity level at seven critical relay points along the
auditory route. If there is brain damage near a relay point, that peak will be
missing. In a person of normal hearing there would be no missing peaks,
therefore showing negative results for brain disorders.

The system has several advantages over other methods of
diagnosis: it does not require the patient to describe what he or she hears –
or even to be conscious during the procedure. But most important, says Arnold
Starr, Irvine’s chief of neurology and one of the developers of the technique
says that “for the first time we can get information from the depth of the
brain, and with a procedure that takes about four minutes.”

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

With the tobacco sourced ZMapp as the leading reliable
candidate for stopping the current Ebola pandemic, has Ebola inadvertently
saved the embattled American tobacco industry?

By: Ringo Bones

With the recent 23-billion US dollar lung cancer settlement
of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and the anti-tobacco use campaign of former US Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop during the Reagan Administration, making the conclusion
that the American tobacco industry is currently embattled may be a bit of an
understatement. But with the current Ebola pandemic sending fear and panic to
the world’s global public health policymakers, could Ebola not only save the
embattled American tobacco industry because of ZMapp – the current tobacco
sourced sole reliable cure for Ebola – but might make the American tobacco
industry a prospective leader in the global healthcare industry?

As of late, the second-largest tobacco company in the United
States – the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – is currently paying the widow of a
lung cancer victim a settlement worth 23 Billion US dollars, which, at present,
is the largest court-approved wrongful death settlement payout. Add to that the
increasing legislation of “generic packaging requirements” of brand-name
cigarettes replete with graphic picture warnings of how deleterious tobacco
cigarette smoking can be to ones health, it’s a no-brainer that America’s
leading tobacco firms, and probably the rest of the world, are now probably
hard at work retooling their company’s image and future outlook. But will the
current Ebola epidemic, ironically, thrust America’s and the rest of the
world’s leading tobacco companies into the healthcare and pharmaceutical
business?

Though negotiations between the top brass of R.J. Reynolds
Tobacco Company and Prof. Charles J. Arntzen, Ph.D. – the inventor of the Ebola
cure ZMapp while working at Mapp Biopharmaceutical.Inc. – is probably yet to happen or yet to get the press coverage it
rightfully deserves, it is now a well-known fact that the tobacco plant derived
ZMapp is, at present, the most effective and most economically viable to
produce cure for Ebola. Thanks to Professor Arntzen “toying with the tobacco
mosaic virus – the virus that causes the tobacco mosaic disease – during the
last eight years that was originally intended as a cure for cystic fibrosis,
the genetically modified tobacco sourced ZMapp has recently proved its worth
for saving the lives of Ebola infected healthcare volunteers Dr. Kent Brantly
and Nancy Writebol.

From the global pharmaceutical industry’s perspective, even
though Ebola the disease was discovered back in 1976, the search for a cure /
vaccine was never pursued with the current fervor because only a handful people
got affected by the disease in the extremely remote parts of Africa and the
unfortunate Ebola sufferers at the time died before they managed to infect
other people. In short, making an Ebola vaccine / cure back in 1976 is
considered not economically viable by the world’s pharmaceutical industry. Even
though the next batch of ZMapp are yet to be “pharmed” from the next harvest of
genetically modified tobacco plants, the “competing” Ebola vaccine that has a
planned 3,000 doses for 2015 has an effectiveness that is still in question in
comparison to ZMapp.